To date, the design of optical transceivers utilizing multi-channel DWDM have been limited by the availability of suitable light sources, multiplexers, and demultiplexers. Most of today's transceivers are configured to operate with no more than ten channels as a result of these limitations. In particular, the transmitter light sources typically comprise expensive, discrete tunable laser devices that require an additional “wavelength locking” element to stabilize and precisely control the output from each individual tunable laser. The need to utilize wavelength tuning (typically a thermal process) and wavelength stabilization/locking has limited the number of channels to no greater than ten, for reliability reasons. These systems further utilize filter-based optical structures as the separate multiplexer and demultiplexer elements, which results in a relatively high insertion loss for the system.